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Ed Webb

Literature Review: GIS for Conflict Analysis « iRevolution - 0 views

  • The study objective is to represent geographic and territorial concepts with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The paper describes the challenges and potential opportunities for creating an integrated GIS model of security.
  • The literature review is a good introduction for anyone interested in the application of GIS to the spatial analysis of conflict. As a colleague mentioned, however, the authors of the study do not cite more recent work in this area, which is rather surprising and unfortunate. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the academic peer-review process can seemingly take forever.
Ed Webb

Would You Protect Your Computer's Feelings? Clifford Nass Says Yes. - ProfHacker - The ... - 0 views

  • The Man Who Lied to His Laptop condenses for a popular audience an argument that Nass has been making for at least 15 years: humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.
  • At first blush, this sounds absurd. Everyone knows that it's "just a computer," and of course computers don't have feelings. And yet. Nass has a slew of amusing stories—and, crucially, studies based on those stories—indicating that, no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares. For example: In one study, users reviewed a software package, either on the same computer they'd used it on, or on a different computer. Consistently, participants gave the software better ratings when they reviewed in on the same computer—as if they didn't want the computer to feel bad. What's more, Nass notes, "every one of the participants insisted that she or he would never bother being polite to a computer" (7).
  • Nass found that users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless. In fact, they liked it as much as the same program, if they were told the praise was accurate. (In other words, flattery was as well received as praise, and both were preferred to no positive comments.) Again, when questioned about the results, users angrily denied any difference at all in their reactions.
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    How do you interact with the computing devices in your life?
Ed Webb

Keep the 'Research,' Ditch the 'Paper' - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

  • we need to construct meaningful opportunities for students to actually engage in research—to become modest but real contributors to the research on an actual question. When students write up the work they’ve actually performed, they create data and potential contributions to knowledge, contributions that can be digitally published or shared with a target community
  • Schuman’s critique of traditional writing instruction is sadly accurate. The skill it teaches most students is little more than a smash-and-grab assault on the secondary literature. Students open a window onto a search engine or database. They punch through to the first half-dozen items. Snatching random gems that seem to support their preconceived thesis, they change a few words, cobble it all together with class notes in the form of an argument, and call it "proving a thesis."
  • What happens when a newly employed person tries to pass off quote-farmed drivel as professional communication?
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  • Generally these papers are just pumped-up versions of the five-paragraph essay, with filler added. Thesis-driven, argumentative, like the newspaper editorials the genre is based on, this "researched writing" promises to solve big questions with little effort: "Reproductive rights resolved in five pages!"
  • Actual writing related to research is modest, qualified, and hesitant
  • our actual model involves elaborately respectful conversation, demonstrating sensitivity to the most nuanced claims of previous researchers
  • Academic, legal, medical, and business writing has easily understandable conventions. We responsibly survey the existing literature, formally or informally creating an annotated bibliography. We write a review of the literature, identifying a "blank" spot ignored by other scholars, or a "bright" spot where we see conflicting evidence. We describe the nature of our research in terms of a contribution to the blank or bright spot in that conversation. We conclude by pointing to further questions.
  • Millions of pieces of research writing that aren’t essays usefully circulate in the profession through any number of sharing technologies, including presentations and posters; grant and experiment proposals; curated, arranged, translated, or visualized data; knowledgeable dialogue in online media with working professionals; independent journalism, arts reviews, and Wikipedia entries; documentary pitches, scripts and storyboards; and informative websites.
  • real researchers don’t write a word unless they have something to contribute. We should teach our students to do the same
Ed Webb

Review: Windows 7 strong, but don't pay to upgrade by AP: Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

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    Next week, Microsoft is releasing Windows 7, a slick, much improved operating system that should go a long way toward erasing the bad impression left by its previous effort, Vista.
Ed Webb

CRITICAL AI: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as Chat... - 1 views

  • In the long run, we believe, teachers need to help students develop a critical awareness of generative machine models: how they work; why their content is often biased, false, or simplistic; and what their social, intellectual, and environmental implications might be. But that kind of preparation takes time, not least because journalism on this topic is often clickbait-driven, and “AI” discourse tends to be jargony, hype-laden, and conflated with science fiction.
  • Make explicit that the goal of writing is neither a product nor a grade but, rather, a process that empowers critical thinking
  • Students are more likely to misuse text generators if they trust them too much. The term “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) has become a marketing tool for hyping products. For all their impressiveness, these systems are not intelligent in the conventional sense of that term. They are elaborate statistical models that rely on mass troves of data—which has often been scraped indiscriminately from the web and used without knowledge or consent.
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  • LLMs usually cannot do a good job of explaining how a particular passage from a longer text illuminates the whole of that longer text. Moreover, ChatGPT’s outputs on comparison and contrast are often superficial. Typically the system breaks down a task of logical comparison into bite-size pieces, conveys shallow information about each of those pieces, and then formulaically “compares” and “contrasts” in a noticeably superficial or repetitive way. 
  • In-class writing, whether digital or handwritten, may have downsides for students with anxiety and disabilities
  • ChatGPT can produce outputs that take the form of  “brainstorms,” outlines, and drafts. It can also provide commentary in the style of peer review or self-analysis. Nonetheless, students would need to coordinate multiple submissions of automated work in order to complete this type of assignment with a text generator.  
  • No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. 
  • LLMs often mimic the harmful prejudices, misconceptions, and biases found in data scraped from the internet
  • Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Given that social media and the internet are full of bogus accounts using synthetic text, alerting students to the intrinsic problems of such writing could be beneficial. (See the “ChatGPT/LLM Errors Tracker,” maintained by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.)
  • Since ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content, it seems like a poor foundation for building students’ skills and may circumvent their independent thinking.
  • Good journalism on language models is surprisingly hard to find since the technology is so new and the hype is ubiquitous. Here are a few reliable short pieces.     “ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now” edited by Susan Dagostino, Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2023  “University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?” by Katyanna Quach, The Register, December 27, 2022  “How to spot AI-generated text” by Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2022  The Road to AI We Can Trust, Substack by Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher who writes frequently and lucidly about the topic. See also Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s Language Generator Has No Idea What It’s Talking About” (2020).
  • “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, March 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, doi: 10.1145/3442188. A blog post summarizing and discussing the above essay derived from a Critical AI @ Rutgers workshop on the essay: summarizes key arguments, reprises discussion, and includes links to video-recorded presentations by digital humanist Katherine Bode (ANU) and computer scientist and NLP researcher Matthew Stone (Rutgers).
Ed Webb

A Review of NOOKStudy - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Though the software will sync information between two computers, highlights and notes created in NOOKStudy won't sync to the Nook, nor will highlights and notes created on the Nook sync to NOOKStudy. In fact, NOOKStudy couldn't even bring me to the correct page in the book I'm currently reading. At least the pages in NOOKStudy seem to correspond with the pagination you'd see on the Nook, so finding one's place isn't horrendously difficult, but still. Amazon had this sort of thing figured out with Whispersync some time ago.
Ed Webb

How to Choose the Best Web Browser - Reviews by PC Magazine - 0 views

    • Ed Webb
       
      What, no Flock?
Ed Webb

Bad News : CJR - 0 views

  • Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism.
  • the News Hunt is a way of getting young journalists to critically examine the work of professionals. For Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker about the online world and the man credited with coining the phrase “virtual community,” it’s all about teaching them “crap detection.”
  • last year Rheingold wrote an important essay about the topic for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site
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  • What’s at stake is no less than the quality of the information available in our society, and our collective ability to evaluate its accuracy and value. “Are we going to have a world filled with people who pass along urban legends and hoaxes?” Rheingold said, “or are people going to educate themselves about these tools [for crap detection] so we will have collective intelligence instead of misinformation, spam, urban legends, and hoaxes?”
  • I previously called fact-checking “one of the great American pastimes of the Internet age.” But, as Rheingold noted, the opposite is also true: the manufacture and promotion of bullshit is endemic. One couldn’t exist without the other. That makes Rheingold’s essay, his recent experiment with NewsTrust, and his wiki of online critical-thinking tools” essential reading for journalists. (He’s also writing a book about this topic.)
  • I believe if we want kids to succeed online, the biggest danger is not porn or predators—the biggest danger is them not being able to distinguish truth from carefully manufactured misinformation or bullshit
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    As relevant to general education as to journalism training
Ed Webb

Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google - 0 views

  • he Anti-Google: Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO)
  • essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines
  • "You can't come up with a search filter that solves the problem of information overload," Zucca told Ars. OUP is betting that the solution to the problem lies in content, which is its area of expertise, and not in technology, which is Google's and Microsoft's.
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  • at least users can see exactly how the sausage is made. Contrast this to Google or Bing, where the search algorithm that produces results is a closely guarded secret.
  • The word that Zucca used a number of times in our chat was "authority," and OUP is betting that individual and institutional users will value the authority enough that they'll be willing to pay for access to the service
  • This paywall is the only feature of OBO that seems truly unfortunate, given that the competition (search and Wikipedia) is free. High school kids and motivated amateurs will be left slumming it with whatever they can get from the public Internet, and OBO's potential reach and impact will be severely limite
Ed Webb

Views: How Tweet It Is - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Part of my interest in this turn to Twitter comes from disappointment with most university press blogs, which often seem more like PR vehicles than genuine blogs with discussion, disagreement, expressions of real enthusiasm or curiosity or whatever. Reading very many of them at one sitting feels like attending a banquet where you are served salt-free soda crackers and caffeine-free Mountain Dew that's gone flat.By contrast, university-press publicists seem more inclined to experiment and to follow tangents with Twitter than they do on their own official websites. They link to material they have posted at the press’s blog, of course – but also to news and commentary that may be only obliquely related to the books in their catalog. It’s as if they escape from beneath the institutional superego long enough to get into the spirit of blogging, proper.
  • The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.
  • She then makes a point that bears stressing given how often university-press blogs tend to be coated in institutional gray: “I think that any kind of social networking needs to have a personality tied to it in order for it to be successful. Also, I think you really need to participate in the media in order for it to be successful. We ask people for questions and opinions, offer giveaways sometimes. My main goal is to try to get people talking -- either with me or with each other about our books and authors.... You can't just provide information or news feeds to reviews and articles about your books. Involving the Press in what is going, contributing to the various discussions, and asking (and answering) questions is really the way to grow your following.”
Ed Webb

The Internet Intellectual - 0 views

  • Even Thomas Friedman would be aghast at some of Jarvis’s cheesy sound-bites
  • What does that actually mean?
  • In Jarvis’s universe, all the good things are technologically determined and all the bad things are socially determined
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  • Jarvis never broaches such subtleties. His is a simple world:
  • why not consider the possibility that the incumbents may be using the same tools, Jarvis’s revered technologies, to tell us what to think, and far more effectively than before? Internet shelf space may be infinite, but human attention is not. Cheap self-publishing marginally improves one’s chances of being heard, but nothing about this new decentralized public sphere suggests that old power structures—provided they are smart and willing to survive—will not be able to use it to their benefit
  • Jarvis 1.0 was all about celebrating Google, but Jarvis 2.0 has new friends in Facebook and Twitter. (An Internet intellectual always keeps up.) Jarvis 1.0 wrote that “Google’s moral of universal empowerment is the sometimes-forgotten ideal of democracy,” and argued that the company “provides the infrastructure for a culture of choice,” while its “algorithms and its business model work because Google trusts us.” Jarvis 2.0 claims that “by sharing publicly, we people challenge Google’s machines and reclaim our authority on the internet from algorithms.”
  • Jarvis has another reference point, another sacred telos: the equally grand and equally inexorable march of the Internet, which in his view is a technology that generates its own norms, its own laws, its own people. (He likes to speak of “us, people of the Net.”) For the Technology Man, the Internet is the glue that holds our globalized world together and the divine numen that fills it with meaning. If you thought that ethnocentrism was bad, brace yourself for Internet-centrism
  • Why worry about the growing dominance of such digitalism? The reason should be obvious. As Internet-driven explanations crowd out everything else, our entire vocabulary is being re-defined. Collaboration is re-interpreted through the prism of Wikipedia; communication, through the prism of social networking; democratic participation, through the prism of crowd-sourcing; cosmopolitanism, through the prism of reading the blogs of exotic “others”; political upheaval, through the prism of the so-called Twitter revolutions. Even the persecution of dissidents is now seen as an extension of online censorship (rather than the other way around). A recent headline on the blog of the Harvard-based Herdictproject—it tracks Internet censorship worldwide—announces that, in Mexico and Morocco, “Online Censorship Goes Offline.” Were activists and dissidents never harassed before Twitter and Facebook?
  • Most Internet intellectuals simply choose a random point in the distant past—the honor almost invariably goes to the invention of the printing press—and proceed to draw a straight line from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, as if the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Reign of Terror, two world wars—and everything else—never happened.
  • even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.
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    In which Evgeny rips Jeff a new one
Ed Webb

How much 'work' should my online course be for me and my students? - Dave's Educational... - 0 views

  • My recommendation for people planning their courses, is to stop thinking about ‘contact hours’. A contact hour is a constraint that is applied to the learning process because of the organizational need to have people share a space in a building. Also called a credit hour, (particularly for American universities) this has meant, from a workload perspective, that for every in class hour a student is meant to do at least 2 (in some cases 3) hours of study outside of class. Even Cliff Notes agrees with me. So… for a full load, that 30 to 45 Total Work Hours for students per course that you are designing.
  • Simple break down (not quite 90, yes i know) Watch 3 hours of video* – 5 hoursRead stuff – 20 hoursListen to me talk – 15 hoursTalk with other students in a group – 15 hoursWrite reflections about group chat – 7.5 hoursRespond to other people’s reflections – 7.5 hoursWork on a term paper – 10 hoursDo weekly quiz – 3 hoursWrite take home mid-term – 3 hoursWrite take home final – 3 hours
  • A thousand variations of this might be imagined
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  • a possible structure recommended by one of the faculty we were talking to was – read/watch, quiz, lecture, student group discussion, reflection. The reasoning here is that if you give learners (particularly new learners) a reading without some form of accountability (a quiz) they are much less likely to do it. I know that for me, when I’ve done the readings, I’m far more likely to attend class. Putting the student group discussion after the lecture gives students who can’t attend a synchronous session a chance to review the recording
  • The standardization police have been telling us for years that each student must learn the same things. Poppycock. Scaffolding doesn’t mean taking away student choice. There are numerous approaches to allowing a little or a lot of choice into your classes (learner contracts come to mind). Just remember, most students don’t want choice – at first. 12-16 years of training has told them that you the faculty member have something you want them to do and they need to find the trick of it. It will take a while until those students actually believe you want their actual opinion.
  • You can have a goal like – get them acculturated to the field – and work through your activities to get there. It’s harder, they will need your patience, but once they get their minds around it, it makes things much more interesting.
Ed Webb

I unintentionally created a biased AI algorithm 25 years ago - tech companies are still... - 0 views

  • How and why do well-educated, well-intentioned scientists produce biased AI systems? Sociological theories of privilege provide one useful lens.
  • Scientists also face a nasty subconscious dilemma when incorporating diversity into machine learning models: Diverse, inclusive models perform worse than narrow models.
  • fairness can still be the victim of competitive pressures in academia and industry. The flawed Bard and Bing chatbots from Google and Microsoft are recent evidence of this grim reality. The commercial necessity of building market share led to the premature release of these systems.
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  • Their training data is biased. They are designed by an unrepresentative group. They face the mathematical impossibility of treating all categories equally. They must somehow trade accuracy for fairness. And their biases are hiding behind millions of inscrutable numerical parameters.
  • biased AI systems can still be created unintentionally and easily. It’s also clear that the bias in these systems can be harmful, hard to detect and even harder to eliminate.
  • with North American computer science doctoral programs graduating only about 23% female, and 3% Black and Latino students, there will continue to be many rooms and many algorithms in which underrepresented groups are not represented at all.
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